Representation of utterances and meaning

I will characterize a language as a relation between `form' and
`meaning'. In the case of spoken natural languages, the `form'
consists of `sound'. Understanding a language means to be able to
assign meaning to utterances from that language; speaking a language
means to be able to produce the appropriate utterances of that
language for a given meaning. In grammars, `form' and `meaning' need to
be represented in some way or other.
A grammar represents the meaning and sound between which it defines a
relation, by some sort of representation. To represent natural language
utterances, a grammar may define phonological representations. The
denotation of these phonological representations are utterances.
In current computational linguistic practice, such representations
often simply take the form of a list of words, i.e. written language
is used to represent spoken language. Given that written language is
so common in our culture no problem arises here. If one is interested
in spoken language, however, the relation
between written and spoken language should be defined as well (or rather
the relation between spoken language and the phonological representations).

On the other hand, there is much less agreement as to what the
`meaning' of natural language utterances is, and how that meaning
should be represented. In
a model theoretic view on meaning, the meaning of utterances
is represented by logical formulas. The interpretation
of these formulas then constitute (model-theoretic) meaning.
However, what kind of logic
is needed to describe meanings of natural language is a matter of
debate. I will not take part in this debate, but abstract away from
the details of the choice of natural language semantics. The
assumption I will make is that such logical formulas (semantic
representations) can be described by feature structures. In order to
provide for some exemplification, I will use simple semantic
structures, which are defined in subsection 1.2.3.